Farm Animal ManifestoAn Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM

Mike Jaynes
February 2008

In the spirit of Animal Welfare and reducing animal suffering, if one eats
meat please consider eating only meat from small, local, family farms.

World Farm Animals Day 2008 will be celebrated on or around October 2nd in
over 50 U.S. cities this year. October 2nd is Mohandas Gandhi’s birthday,
and Farm Sanctuary sponsors the event and hopes awareness of farmed animal
rights will spread and the nonviolence and peaceful philosophy of Gandhi may
be extended to farm animals. This is an event celebrating the rights of the
55 billion farmed animals and aquatic creatures that are yearly abused and
killed in the world’s factory farms and slaughterhouses unseen and far from
the eyes of the public. To look at it another way, one hundred million
animals a minute are abused and killed each and every day according to
statistics published by Farm Sanctuary.
World Farm Animals Day is partly to raise awareness of this wholesale
destruction of sentience and partly to promote farmed animal rights. The
systematic farming of animals has refined its efforts into a very efficient
machine in which animals are referred to as “production units” and are
destroyed without any moral consideration whatsoever. However, this
particular day and its activities are specifically, and only, for the
billions of farmed animals who die in anonymous agony each day. I will be
speaking in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on September 27th at 10:00 a.m. I am
pleased Elizabeth Ferrari and Saving Animals Via Education (S.A.V.E.) have
invited me to appear and take part in Chattanooga’s “Walk for Farm Animals,”
and that brings me to the subject of this article.

I have recently been researching and publishing editorials on various
aspects of the Animal Rights movement. Our country was the first to pass
animal welfare laws to prevent cruelty to animals, and the active above
ground and direct action animal rights and welfare organizations are doing
amazing work. We have a long way to go before we are a humane country, but I
would like to offer a practical way you can help animals. While wishing
everyone would make the commitment to adopt a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle,
I realize the sociocultural normative traditions of most Americans
classifies this as extreme or even a little psychotic. I appreciate
individuality and wish very fervently to be acquainted with vegans and meat
eaters alike. However, I do offer all you carnivores a challenge. Please
look into what “mass confinement factory farming” means if you continue to
consume meat. Virtually all of the meat you buy at Wal-Mart and other large
chain stores is factory farmed.

Restaurants mostly offer factory farmed meat as well. The days of the kindly
farmer raising pigs and chickens in natural conditions is mostly a thing of
the past. Now it is “mass confinement factory farming,” and this is a
sometimes a nightmare. There are few family farmers anymore who walk their
land, care for their animal charges, and treat the Earth with respect: now
there are only corporations, billion dollar corporations committed to making
the most amount of money in the shortest and most efficient way. And money
they do make; mass confinement factory farming operations bring in billions
of dollars in profit annually while the vast majority of their customers
have no idea what goes on behind their closed doors. Quickly, let me draw
upon chapter six of Matthew Scully’s important book Dominion: The Power of
Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy and tell you what mass
confinement factory farming is.

Pigs have been shown to be intelligent as a three year old human child and
more so than the average dog. It has been reported that many factory farmed
Pigs never leave the confines of the dim cement floored indoor pens in which
they are crammed like trash. Chickens either. They never see the sun, never
feel the grass, never raise their young. Their feet never touch earth. Often
up to 250,000 animals are kept enclosed in one building.

Large factory farms have driven almost every family farm out of existence.
Breeding sows are forced to live in metal stalls seven feet long by 22
inches wide. They weigh 400-500 pounds and break their legs trying to turn
around. They live in their own filth and are denied the straw they use to
make their beds in free range farms. However, they still paw the dank cement
floor, slatted so that their excrement runs into vast waste tanks, trying to
make piles they can lay upon.

They birth their young and nurse for a fraction of the time they do in the
wild unable to turn and see their piglets. Then the piglets are taken away
from them, an artificial insemination device is crammed inside them, and the
cycle begins again. This is often the entirety of their brief and sad life.
If a dog was confined this way his entire life, his guardian would be
charged with a crime.

Chickens fare no better, and these pigs need socialization and care. In the
wild, pigs never urinate or defecate within twenty feet of where they sleep,
so one can imagine their revulsion at being forced to nurse their young in
such conditions. Mass confinement factory farms treat them as economic items
(“production units” is the industry euphemism) and it’s entirely legal for
them to do so.

If you love dogs or cats and have them in your home, please consider these
pigs that are just as loving and intelligent. So, I challenge you to look
into the practices of factory farming and be educated as to what you are
supporting. Animals depend on us to do the right thing; they trust us to
provide for them. Scully also writes, “As industrial farming spreads,
mankind has broken that trust.” If you are not ready to go vegetarian, you
can still avoid supporting factory farms by growing from local farms with
“free range” pigs, cows, and chickens. Yes, the animals are still butchered
and deprived of the rights they deserve- you should know this- but they
spend their lives in their natural habitats, rooting, playing, running, and
raising their young in the manner in which they have evolved. This life may
not seem like much to us, but as it has been pointed out before, it’s all
they have. It’s everything to them and we should not take it from them.

Keep in mind you must research these free ranging farms because many of them
are playing on consumer sympathy to make increased profits by labeling
certain products as "Animal Friendly" "Environmentally conscious" or other
terms while maintaining operations of cruelty not much different from the
factory farms. In truth, family farms are still taking the animals’ rights
to their flesh, their offspring, and their productions. You, the consumer,
must be educated and vigilantly committed to significantly reducing cruelty
to farm animals to make a difference with your purchasing power. After all,
the only language many factory farms speak is economics. Common sense,
sympathy for animals, and revulsion to inhumane treatment of animals has not
and will not move them. The only way we have to battle them and help the
animals is to choose wisely where we spend our money. And if you will not
make the commitment to go vegetarian, I would rather you buy from a true
free range family farm than a giant factory farm. And, in fairness, all
factory farms are not equal. Some farmers have pointed out that large farms
might be able to run ethical operations. This may be possible. However,
buying meat from small local farms seems to have far less unknown elements
involved.

There are four major pork producers in the U.S. These billion dollar
companies are driving the smaller family free range farms into the ground.
Most of us imagine kindly farmers raising pigs and chickens and cows on
ranches with huge blue skies and old red barns. This is usually not true. I
want to reemphasize: most people can’t even bear to witness the activities
that happen inside these walls. Videos of slaughterhouses are available, but
most people often avoid them. “I don’t want to know,” they tell me. They
recoil from even the thought of seeing the truth. They can’t bear to witness
this crushing cruelty and human induced suffering. Yet they consume and
consume factory-farmed meats thereby causing the terror they can’t bear to
see, or at least it could be argued. But you can avoid these farms if you
will spend a little more become an educated consumer.

If you have any questions regarding going vegetarian or the sources used in
this piece, please conduct independent research. Finally, please consider
going vegetarian or vegan, and if you can’t, then please buy family owned
free range farms and help us send the message to the mass confinement
factory farms that we think this if wrong and even cruel in the worst cases.
Pigs chickens cows and humans are all animals; we all feel pain, we all
dream, and we all seek pleasure. Even though this short article focuses on
the plight of pigs, I believe all animals deserve our mercy and compassion.
Pigs, chickens, minks, foxes, skunks, elephants, chinchillas, birds,
turkeys, and all animals look to us for protection and care. They all
deserve better. We can do better.

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